The College Hill Independent Vol. 32 Issue 6

the college hill independent Volume 32

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a Brown/RISD weekly

March 18, 2016

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Issue 06

the

NEWS 02 Week in Modern Warfare Wilson Cusack, Piper French, Jonah Max, & Will Tavlin

Volume 32 No. 6

03 Niche News Madeleine Matsui 05 A State of Mourning Camila Ruiz Segovia METRO 06 Ghosts of Industry Jane Argodale 09 Trees of Life Ben Berke ARTS 13 Hysterical Womanhood Isabelle Doyle FEATURES 07 Infinite Dust Ian Bowers

From the editors: A classic case of beard wears you!

This week: an activity in reciprocity. Optional activity. We know you’re busy—in the fray; caught up where the thick of it’s kept. But just, for a second, as your shoulder rubs up against the bark, ask yourself: who is this juniper tree hiding from?

LG

11 Lose Yourself Gabrielle Hick, Patrick McMenamin, & Dominique Pariso OCCULT 12 Celebrity Tutor: Hong Kong Edition Natalie Tsang TECH 16 I, Therapist Joseph Frankel LITERARY 17 A Poem Cluster Liby Hays EPHEMERA 15 Cameo India Ennenga X 18 Weak in the Cullottes Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, & Pierie Korostoff

Managing Editors Camera Ford Alec Mapes-Frances Francis Torres News Jane Argodale Piper French Julia Tompkins Metro Sophie Kasakove Jamie Packs Shane Potts Arts Lisa Borst Jonah Max Eli Neuman-Hammond Features Gabrielle Hick Patrick McMenamin Dominique Pariso Science Fatima Husain Marcelo Rivera-Figueroa Tech Kamille Johnson

Interviews Elias Bresnick Occult Lance Gloss Literary Marcus Mamourian Metabolics Sam Samore Ephemera Mark Benz Jake Brodsky India Ennenga X Layla Ehsan Sara Khan Pierie Korostoff List Lisa Borst Alec Mapes-Frances Patrick McMenamin Rick Salamé Cover Jade Donaldson Design & Illustration Celeste Matsui Alexa Terfloth Zak Ziebell

P.O Box 1930 Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

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Staff Writers Ben Berke Jack Brook Liz Cory Kelton Ellis Liby Hays Corey Hébert Hannah Maier-Katkin Madeleine Matsui Kimberley Meilun Ryan Rosenberg Will Tavlin Staff Illustrators Frans van Hoek Gabriel Matesanz Teri Minogue Yuko Okabe Ivan Rios-Fetchko Web Charlie Windolf Senior Editors Sebastian Clark Rick Salamé Kim Sarnoff Maya Sorabjee MVPs Madeleine Matsui Yuko Okabe

@theindy_tweets

WEEK IN MODERN WARFARE

by Wilson Cusack, Piper French, Jonah Max, & Will Tavlin

Protocols and Transgressions On the night of March 1st two Israeli Defense Force troops found themselves in the Palestinian refugee camp of Qalandiya, seemingly on account of a malfunctioning GPS application. The app in question was Waze—a navigation program developed in conjunction with the Israeli government and Google, now popular among both Israeli military personnel and American Uber and Lyft drivers. While other GPS applications might inform their users of heavy traffic or road construction, Waze differentiates itself by highlighting what it deems “dangerous zones” (sites of protest, political conflict, or even simply low-income neighborhoods). It also provides clients with incentives—marked by virtual cupcakes with various point values, which increase one’s status in the Waze “community”—to encourage drivers to send useful data from less-traveled routes back to the company’s servers, which will in turn be used to provide more accurate information for other clients. The application, however, also requires its users to maintain a strong wireless connection to operate properly—a connection strength which the Israeli government has historically suppressed through electromagnetic frequency restrictions in the Palestinian controlled areas of the Gaza Strip and West Bank. While it remains unclear why exactly the two IDF troops received such faulty information from the application, many suspect that this strategic wireless suppression may be the cause.

Attempting to drive towards a military destination in the West Bank, the soldiers instead deviated from the authorized route, crossing several Israeli checkpoints and entering into the refugee camp—a borderland wedged between Ramallah and Jerusalem. Once within the bounds of the camp, the soldiers were fired upon, leading to a lengthy firefight with refugees. At some point the Israeli “Hannibal Protocol” was instantiated, an extraction technique in which the Israeli alert level is raised and a vast increase in troop presence is permitted with the goal of avoiding Israeli casualties during a rescue operation. As dawn broke and the protocol concluded, twenty-odd Israeli military jeeps retreated back behind the walls of Jerusalem, leaving behind a dozen injured Palestinians and the body of Eyad Sajadiyeh, a twenty-two-year-old Palestinian university student. The transgression and the protocol—paired states of exception which at once elicit violence and permit the dominant power seemingly endless liberty and resources to subdue it, nearly always through greater acts of violence itself—have become, all too often, means for the IDF to surreptitiously preserve colonial rule.

-JM

March 18, 2016

Sunblocked Nowhere in the United States is it harder to harness the power of the sun than in the Sunshine State itself. The price of solar panels has dropped by more than 80 percent since President Obama took office, yet Florida—the sunniest state east of the Mississippi—still manages to fall behind the likes of Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey in solar usage. “It defies logic,” says former Governor of Florida Charlie Crist. In a state of nearly 20 million people, fewer than 9,000 Florida homes have solar panels installed.

Floridians, with the second-highest electrical consumption in the nation, are not opposed to the idea of solar panels.

But investor-owned utilities (IOUs), and the lobbyist groups that petition lawmakers on their behalf, are. Want a few solar panels installed on your roof? Be careful you don’t break a few laws in the process. The state legislature’s utility law limits the purchase and sale of electricity to IOUs exclusively. There is no mandate to generate any percentage of the state’s electricity from renewable energy, and solar leasing programs, which bring down the often-prohibitive upfront cost of the panels themselves, are banned as well.

The Koch brothers are well known for throwing money at their personal vendettas until they disappear—and in 2016, Florida is their new battleground. Koch brothers-funded lobbyist groups, like the American Legislative Exchange Council, are working hard to ensure these solar laws not only stay in place but become even more restrictive. It helps that Florida is served by a part-time state legislature. Strict term limits and a low salary helps ensure lawmakers will take a lucrative campaign donation in exchange for votes whenever they can.

“Out in eight years? You’re giving more power to lobbyists,” said one Republican state lawmaker. The state’s utilities are not keeping their strategy a secret either. “It’s no secret we play an active role in public policy,” says Mark Bubriski, spokesman for Florida Power & Light, the largest utility in the state.

IOUs in the sunshine state are now looking to consolidate their stranglehold on the solar market through a new amendment to the state legislature. Incongruously named “Smart Solar,” the amendment, which will tighten the already existing restrictions against solar power initiatives in Florida, is both well funded and strategically executed. Proposed amendments in Florida require 700,000 signatures in order to qualify for a ballot. Backed by millions from the Koch donor network, proponents of Smart Solar have reached that threshold easily, outspending the rival pro-solar amendment, known as “Solar Choice,” by nearly two-to-one. Smart Solar lobbyists have even gone so far as to lift language from the Solar Choice amendment in order to confuse residents into signing their petition. Smart Solar won’t be voted on until November, but already it’s looking like a success: Solar Choice, utterly outspent, recently disbanded its campaign.

When the bill passes, it’s likely that Smart Solar’s champions will hold a press conference to honor their hard-spent efforts—perhaps it will even be held outdoors. Just maybe, under the blinding Floridian sun, politicians, with a hand above their eyes, will wince and wonder: if only there was a way to put this damn thing to good.

No-Mile-High Club It’s hard to travel as a family when the Canadian government thinks your six-year-old son is a terrorist. Sulemaan Ahmed and Khadija Cajee have had to go through extra security with their son, Syed Adam Ahmed, since he was a toddler. Though no one has ever explicitly told them the reason for the extra hassle, the family assumes that Syed has the same name as someone on one of the government’s no-fly list, what’s known as a “false positive” in government parlance. The family recently received some media attention for the issue, causing at least 23 other families to come forward saying that they experience the same issue with their own children. Recently, one such family was nearly prevented from returning to Canada from India.

Canada’s federal public safety minister has indicated the government is working on solving the false positive issue, emphasizing that he can sympathize with the families’ frustration. Still, there are a number of factors that complicate any easy solution to Syed’s problem. Airline passengers are identified only by a name and birthday, and airlines wouldn’t want to risk letting a person on the no-fly list check in online just by making up a new birthday, or using the birthday of someone who has the same name. Getting around this means adding another identifier, like address or social security number, but, again, you might be able to find the address of someone with the same name...Anyway, though the delays have let up slightly in recent months, the family says that Syed still has to go through “visual identification” to get on board, a complicated process by which an airline official looks at the child, realizes they’re not the same 55-year-old Syed Ahmed that’s wanted for terrorist activity in Yemen or what have you, and lets the family pass.

Most recently, Syed and his father were held up on their way to the United States to watch a hockey championship.

After all, Canada is by no means the only country with a no-fly list—the U.S. boasts a robust list of over 47,000 names (distinct from its even-longer Terrorist Watch List), which Senator Dianne Feinstein has characterized as “one of our best lines of national defense.” No-fly lists didn’t exist in the U.S. before 9/11—Airlines are famously reactive in their responses to potential terrorist threats; no one ever had to remove their shoes in line for security before Richard Reid wedged plastic explosives into his sneakers on a 2001 flight to Miami. This counter-terrorism measure can pat itself on the back for successfully hampering the travel of not only Syed but a number of anti-war activists, prominent Bush opponents such as nowdeceased Senator Ted Kennedy, two distinct Asif Iqals who share the name of a Guantanamo detainee, and the wife of US senator Ted Stevens, whose name is a little too close to that of the 1970s singer-songwriter now known as Yusuf Islam.

After Syed’s most recent run-in with airport security, a selfie Ahmed took once on the plane shows a tiny, slightly smug-looking Syed (they made it on board, after all) wearing a Habs jersey and headphones as large as his own head. Is this the face of a terrorist? No—any TSA agent could tell you as much—but it might be the name of one, and at least for Canada and the US, that’s enough.

-WT

-PF + WC

NEWS

02

JOURNALISM FROM THE MARGINS Requiem for Al Jazeera America

Al Jazeera America has bitten the dust. On February 26, 2016, with all operations slated to close by April 30, 2016, the news outlet issued a final farewell. Entitled “Goodnight and Good Luck,” the first line of the letter read: “The core principle driving the journalism that distinguished Al Jazeera America online as a unique voice in a cluttered news landscape was the simple—yet radical—proposition that no single human life is worth less than any other.”

Al Jazeera America (AJAM) was an American cable and satellite news television channel owned by the Qatar-based Al Jazeera Media Network, the parent company of Al Jazeera and other related networks. The Al Jazeera Media Network has 80 bureaus globally, the second-largest number of bureaus in the world. The Al Jazeera Media Network does not play a role in managing its channels—each is run independently. The Media Network funds its subsidiary channels and services that include several other channels as well as a website, mobile applications, a research center and AJ+, an onlineonly news channel. AJAM aimed to distinguish itself by offering an alternative news channel and news source that would bring serious, in-depth reporting to sound-bitefilled U.S. cable news. The end of the short-lived enterprise demonstrates the difficulties of breaking into a saturated and polarized cable news market. AJAM’s demise also embodies the struggle to create a sustainable business in the context of the 24-hour news cycle that has come to define contemporary journalism. Furthermore, AJAM’s closure provokes questions about the state of contemporary American politics, partisanship and bias that contributed to the channel’s termination. It also evokes questions about the evolving ways in which younger generations are receiving news—which is increasingly through mobile applications and online content. Did AJAM fail because it couldn’t keep up with these changes?

In August 2013, AJAM debuted in the U.S. after Al Jazeera bought Al Gore’s Current TV for $500 million. Initially, Al Jazeera considered expanding Al Jazeera English—its English-language international channel—but later decided to create an independent U.S. channel. Funded primarily by the Qatari government, AJAM lacked a viable business model beyond generous support from the oil-rich country. But even beyond this problem, AJAM struggled to get off the ground. The organization was plagued by consistently low ratings, operational and management problems, and a lack of advertisers. AJAM also lost a number of top executives and journalists after a period of internal turmoil. In May 2015, Mary McGinnis, a senior AJAM executive, resigned from the company, citing a “culture of fear” in which “people are afraid to lose their jobs if they cross [Al Jazeera America chief executive] Ehab [Al Shihabi].”

In May 2015, following a New York Times story that chronicled “deep dysfunction” in the organization, AJAM CEO Ehab Al Shihabi was fired and replaced with Al Jazeera English veteran Al Anstey. Previously, Anstey had served as the international channel’s managing director. In addition to the problems he inherited from Al Shihabi, Anstey had to manage Al Jazeera America digital staffers’ efforts to obtain collective bargaining rights. In October 2015, amid opposition from AJAM management, fifty journalists voted to unionize. On top of all of this, AJAM is currently being sued by several former employees who allege that they were victims of sexism and anti-Semitism in the workplace.

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NEWS

In three years, AJAM recruited seasoned journalist and produced award-wi journalism. With ample funding, AJAM built out a massive newsroom in Midto Manhattan and bureaus in eleven other American cities. It also hired multiple w known journalists including Ali Velshi, Joie Chen, Mike Viqueira and former A News executive Kate O’Brian, who was named Al Jazeera America president. W staff of 800 led by prominent journalists, AJAM produced award-winning inves journalism while in operation. As recently as November 2015, AJAM won the G Award from the United Nations Correspondents Association for its coverage of peacekeeping missions in the Central African Republic in a three-part series by B Moran. Within the same month, it also won best documentary at the Internatio Emmy Awards for Miners Shot Down, a film about the investigation of the killi of 24 miners by police during a six day strike in South Africa. AJAM also produ consistent coverage of the Black Lives Matter movement. In its farewell note, AJ explicitly mentions the importance Black Lives Matter as a reminder of the “int epidemic of police shootings of young people of color” that “tapped into that tr of active citizenship.” In addition, AJAM closely followed developments surroun DREAM (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors) Act and the b campaign to reform immigration laws. Unfortunately, AJAM’s mission to produ depth stories highlighting traditionally under-represented voices did not seem to a chord with the American public. Taken together, was AJAM’s demise an impli admonishment for its distinctly liberal reporting style? +++

In 2015, AJAM produced a documentary that linked Denver Broncos quarterba Peyton Manning to human growth hormone. In The Dark Side: The Secret World Doping, Manning and other top athletes from Major League Baseball and the N Football League were accused of using performance-enhancing drugs, which the since denied. In response to the documentary, Manning released an angry statem declaring the allegations to be “complete garbage” and “totally made up.” Baseba Ryan Howard and Ryan Zimmerman, who were both implicated in the docume have filed defamation suits against AJAM and Manning has publically stated tha contemplating doing the same, potentially adding to AJAM’s long list of headac response to reports that Al Jazeera America was closing down, Manning said: “I’ it’s going to be just devastating to all their viewers.” Personal gripes with the net aside, Manning is not too upset about Al Jazeera America’s closing—much like t Americans who never bothered to tune in.

Despite their efforts and money, AJAM was fundamentally unable to draw away from powerful cable networks such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, fai exceed 30,000 primetime viewers, according to its Nielsen ranking. In comparis 2015 Fox News had an average primetime audience of 349,000 viewers, while C had 243,000 and MSNBC had 143,000. Its inability to attract a significant view during its run illustrates the difficulty of changing viewers’ entrenched loyalties established cable networks. Each major network has cornered a section of the ca news market, with little overlap between them, especially on news about politics government.

A Pew Research Center study released in 2014 found that American liberal conservatives have completely different information streams “distinct from those individuals with more mixed political views—and very distinct from each other.

The study found that 47% of self-identified conservatives obtained their news ab government and politics from Fox News and 88% reported trusting Fox News. comparison, self-identifying liberals were “less unified in their media loyalty” bu 12% cited MSNBC as a cable TV news source, while those closer to the middle ideological spectrum declared CNN and local TV as their main news sources. Th study found that only consumers who identified as “consistently liberal” trusted as a news source. These results demonstrate that ideological differences in media

The College Hill Independent

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preferences have evolved according to specific audience profiles and has contributed to the country-wide increase in political polarization.

What does this signify for AJAM? The results suggest that no matter the depth of its fiscal resources, the network would have had a lot of trouble breaking into the cable news market in the U.S. In a saturated cable television news market, any new network would have had a difficult time sustaining momentum. Moreover, its well-intentioned quest to produce fact-based cable news was mismatched with the current political and news environment in the United States. Al Jazeera America presented a British style of cable news, more serious and dry than many American networks and ultimately incompatible with mainstream American audiences; a former reporter said in an interview with the Chicago Reader that the channel needed more “‘Holy Shit!’ stories”. Furthermore, given its late entry to the cable news market and the fact that its viewership consists of liberal viewers, AJAM would have been better off investing its millions into its online news platform AJ+ that launched in September 2014. Since its inception, AJ+ has been extremely successful, reaching one billion viewers in October 2015. Their issues were aggravated by AJAM’s very name, which made a patent connection to the Arab world that did not sit as well with viewers in the United States as in Europe. Media writer Jack Shafer wrote in a column in Reuters that in a post 9/11 world, Al Jazeera sounds too much, perhaps, like al Qaeda “at least to some American ears,” and that maybe “our subliminal perceptions” play a role in AJAM’s unpopularity.

In addition, in spite of its potential to specialize in international and Middle Eastern news, AJAM decided to focus on domestic news instead. Today, quality international news, especially reporting from the Middle East, has become increasingly rare due to rising costs and safety concerns. In 2009, the Columbia Journalism Review published an article called “The Reconstruction of American Journalism” describing the vast changes occurring in domestic reporting due to the “collapsing” economic foundations of American newspapers and commercial television news. The article reports that as a result of declining profits and “repeated rounds of deep cost-cutting,” there has been a decline in the percentage of international news. “Retreating from the World,” an article published in the American Journalism Review in 2011, explains that mainstream news organizations have “turned their backs on foreign news,” with many news outlets closing down their overseas bureaus.

The Al Jazeera Media Network has more bureaus worldwide than any network except for the BBC. Though benefitting from a global presence, AJAM’s homegrown team and US-based bureaus might have provided a chance for it to establish credibility as an impartial news provider, separate from other arms of Al Jazeera that have less than solid reputations among some Americans. Al Jazeera Arabic, for example, has been accused of broadcasting propaganda on behalf of the Qatari royal family and government. On the other hand, perhaps no action short of changing its name could have saved AJAM from being associated with the larger company’s perceived antiAmerican, pro-Islamic slant.

In its brief tenure, AJAM was an instructive experiment in cable news journalism.

Within an increasingly politically polarized environment, American television news has become more and more about playing out ideological battles instead of in-depth coverage of important issues. Beginning in the early 1980s, programs such as CNN’s Crossfire have institutionalized this combative approach to television news. Increasingly, panelists have been rewarded for their pugnacity and theatrics, with more viewers tuning in to watch verbal brawls over more rational debate. As a result, these confrontations have resulted in higher ratings for television networks. By eschewing complexity and a breadth of perspectives, television news networks and their viewers consent to promoting shallowness and shock-value.

AJAM may not have resolved these deeply ingrained issues, but it offered hope that a new network could intervene and perhaps break these perturbing patterns. Its focus on minority voices and stories offered a refreshing, albeit unmistakably liberal take on news. It is possible that AJAM was penalized for straying from orthodox cable

March 18, 2016

television news presentation, including its choice and style of coverage. The network set out with the explicit mission of encouraging nuanced, engaged reporting. As the last lines of Al Jazeera America’s farewell note read: “[AJAM’s legacy] is a journalism of value and of values not tied to any ideology or political entity but morally committed when confronted by racism and bigotry, violence against the innocent, injustice and inequality, sexism and homophobia.” Afflicted with problems throughout its three years, Al Jazeera America was not successful. In its wake, perhaps its idealism can inspire someone or something to realize its failed but valiant mission to produce journalism that “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.”

MADELEINE MATSUI B’17 is overwhelmed by the news.

NEWS

04

BERTA CÁCERES, PRESENTE

by Camila Ruiz Segovia illustration by Frans van Hoek

Indigenous Resistance and Repression in Honduras On the morning of March 5, the streets of the small Honduran town of La Esperanza woke up to the sounds of mournful crowds and cries for justice. Locals gathered to say goodbye to the prominent indigenous environmental activist, Berta Cáceres, slain in the early morning hours of March 3. Gunmen had broken into her house and shot her to death. The procession followed Cáceres’ white coffin to the local cemetery, where her family waited in tears. Cáceres had received numerous death threats for her activism throughout her career, but these had intensified in the days leading up to her death. Aware of the dangers of political activism in Honduras, Cáceres’ colleagues had prepared a eulogy on her behalf years in advance. But when the moment arrived to deliver the goodbye speeches, the realization that one more victim had fallen to the country’s endless violence hit hard in the hearts of her friends.

Only a year earlier, Cáceres had flown to San Francisco to receive the Goldman Environmental Prize—better known as the Green Nobel—for her work in defense of Honduras’ Gualcarque River, which formed part of the territory of the Lanca indigenous people. In 2013, a transnational construction company (Sinohydro) and state-owned company (DESA) planned for the construction of a dam on the river, in a joint project that would displace the local community. In 1993, Cáceres co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), which rallied against the construction of the dam. While several indigenous groups have mobilized for the defense of land in Latin America in recent decades, defeat is the usual outcome in a region where transnational interests heavily influence political agendas. Yet against all odds, Berta won the battle. Both companies pulled out from the project in 2013, after she organized a year-long peaceful roadblock with fellow COPINH members.

However, Berta’s victory was ended with a bullet. It is unclear whether the details about her assassination will come to light any time soon. The night of her murder, Berta was hosting a Mexican environmental activist named Gustavo Castro at her home in La Esperanza. According to local accounts, both activists woke to the sound of gunmen entering the house.

Though both activists were shot, Castro was only wounded.

The following day, when Castro attempted to return to Mexico, he was detained by Honduran police. The country’s Attorney General determined that, as the sole witness of the crime, Castro was to stay in the country throughout the investigations, for a minimum of 30 days. The court had clearly dismissed the fact that he himself was a victim of an assassination attempt.

What’s more: on a public letter published on local newspapers, Castro declared that he had been deprived from food and sleeping while detained. Police claimed to have shown him several pictures of potential suspects, but Castro denounced that the photos corresponded to COPINH members, on what may have been a police attempt of criminalizing environmental activists. The question is whether the government is afraid that Castro may reveal to the world what Honduran people strongly suspect: Cáceres’ assassination was an act of political terror. She is now one among among hundreds of Honduran activists silenced by the government since the country's 2009 coup.

Since the 1990s, Cáceres had peacefully campaigned

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NEWS

against the entrance of extractive companies in Lenca’s territories in Honduras. She became known for her explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-racist and feminist rhetoric, for her commitment to her community, and for fearlessly denouncing government abuses and US intervention. Like thousands of indigenous people across the Americas, Cáceres turned to environmental activism when her community became endangered.

The defense of the environment is not a simple matter of political ideology for these communities: companies that deal in natural resource extraction constitute a real threat to the very existence of indigenous people, as their practices physically destroy the lands they inhabit. Since many of these companies are state-owned or directly work for the government, the interests of the Honduran government are at odds with those of the Lenca people and other indigenous groups. As a means to resolve these differences, the government has opted for the use of repressive violence. +++ Activists like Berta are constant targets of state violence in Honduras. While the Honduran constitution defends the right to protest and the right of indigenous people to govern their lands, the government fails to uphold what its constitution mandates. It's systematic rights abuses have been documented by local groups like COPINH, as well as in reports from Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. The rule of law has weakened since 2009, when President Manuel Zelaya was overthrown in a US-backed military coup. The coup has left an early legacy of dramatic escalation in state-sponsored violence, crime, and corruption. While the country officially transitioned back to democracy in 2010, the ongoing crisis of violence shows that Honduras remains politically unstable. As the country’s governmental institutions are eroded and political violence increases, memories of the era of Cold War dictatorship awake in the minds of Hondurans. Just like in the dictatorship period from 1963 to 1981, the defense of human rights has once again become an act of defiance against the government, as those who stand up against abuses face the possibility of death. While Honduran resistance came in the form of guerrilla warfare during the Cold War, Honduran activists today engage in peaceful forms of protest. Indigenous people, attempting to defend their territories, appeal to international treaties that protect territorial rights when peacefully taking to the streets. And yet, the government response feels eerily reminiscent of another era. Death squad-like groups are silently surging in democratic Honduras, as reported by the Associated Press, and targeting those who defend the environment.

Several other members of COPINH, the indigenous group that Cáceres belonged to, have been victims of acts of violence despite their peaceful campaigns. Tomás García, the second co-founder of COPINH and a close ally of Cáceres, was murdered during a peaceful protest in 2013. In addition to García, 109 environmental activists were killed between 2010 and 2015. Not surprisingly, a March 4 report from international NGO Global Witness ranked the country as the most dangerous for people defending the environment. In the case

of Honduras, a large proportion of these environmental activists are also indigenous people. Berta Cáceres was no exception.

In an effort to prevent potential state repression, she requested protection from the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights against her government. Still, international law and Cáceres’ status as an award-winning environmental and indigenous activist were not enough to save her from the reign of terror. The oppressive hand of the Honduran government does not discriminate.

As history repeats itself and violence becomes increasingly unbearable, a sense of hopelessness reigns in Honduras. Many desperate families from communities touched by violence are opting to send their children away to the United States. The penurious journey usually requires travelling on the top of freight trains for days across Central America and Mexico. Still, for many, this option feels more promising than remaining in Honduras. Last summer, pictures of unaccompanied Central American children migrants reaching the US-Mexico border flooded the internet and caused an uproar among policymakers. They are testament to the degree to which a dignified life in Honduras is becoming impossible for many of its people.

To others, however, the idea of leaving is inconceivable. Indigenous people have resisted five centuries of state oppression in the defense of their territories. Their stake to the land is stronger than the fear of governmental repression. Whether they decide to stay or flee, Hondurans are forced to take this hard decision in the face of the violence that reigns in their country.

Berta did not give up fighting for her land; she was forced to.

In her speech at the 2015 Goldman Prize ceremony, Cáceres said: “Our ancestors taught us that giving our lives for the well-being of the rivers is giving our lives for the well-being of humanity.” She lived up to her words in her defense of the Gualcarque River. As an outspoken indigenous leader, Berta inspired those around her. While aware of the dangers of activism in Honduras, she never hesitated to criticize her government for the defense of her community. Her case is a painful reminder that indigenous people are the first victims of environmental destruction in Honduras, and generally across the region. In remembering the life and work of the indigenous and environmental leader, let us reflect on the resistance of indigenous people across the Americas, and their commitment to protecting the environment, in spite of centuries of state oppression. +++ Note: Less than two weeks after Cáceres’ assassination, while this article went through the editing process, another member of the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras was murdered. Nelson García was shot to death on Tuesday, March 15. He was the leader of the Rio Chiquito community, a group of 150 indigenous families, which, at the time of this writing, is being evicted from their territory by the Honduran military police. It appears that mourning in Honduras is an endless occupation.

CAMILA RUIZ SEGOVIA B’18 is mourning.

The College Hill Independent

A RIVER’S DECLINE

by Jane Argodale

The Woonasquatucket River begins in North Smithfield, Rhode Island, running through the Providence neighborhoods of Olneyville and Federal Hill, then below Providence Place Mall, before merging with the Moshassuck River downtown to form the Providence River. The Woonasquatucket played an important role in Providence’s industrial past, which was at its height at the beginning of the 20th century.

In 1910, Providence was the 20th largest city in the United States, and had over 1,000 manufacturers employing 46,000 workers.

Dams and mills along the river, many of which remain today, powered paper and textile factories. At the center of this hub of activity was Olneyville, in the western part of the city. In 1892, Providence’s now-defunct electric streetcar system started running throughout the city. The Number 13 streetcar ran to Olneyville Square, bringing Polish, German, and Italian immigrant workers from other parts of the west side to nearby factories. Commercial railroads transporting the goods produced in these factories linked Olneyville to Springfield, Hartford, and New York.

That industrial boom is long gone, having left pollution and economic stagnation in its wake. Olneyville is now one of Providence’s lowest-income neighborhoods and decades of property destruction and use of the river to dump garbage and debris have taken their toll. The highways built in the 1950s that cut across the Woonasquatucket river, including Route 6 and I-95, block pedestrian access to much of the river and parks alongside it. Nearby Dyerville State Park and Merino Park are both underused because of the highways that cut them off. A flood in 2010 prompted fears that climate change could eventually wash the neighborhood away. The images here show Olneyville at the peak of its industrial activity. They serve as a reminder that when neighborhoods are abandoned by industry, there is often no one willing or able to clean up afterward.

Olneyville Square in 1913, when the Olneyville neighborhood was at the center of an economic boom in Providence.

A view above the Woonasquatucket River, which powered hundreds of factories in Providence.

A train from a line connecting Providence to New Haven. Goods produced in Providence factories would have been shipped all across the country in trains like this.

A streetcar running through Olneyville. After a sharp drop in revenue beginning with the Great Depression, Providence’s streetcar system began reducing service and was eventually replaced by the current bus system.

JANE ARGODALE B’18 is also a hub of activity.

March 18, 2016

METRO

06

UTAH, IN TIME

by Ian Bowers

Muley Point Tent pitched in the red dirt, colorless in the wide desert dark, whipping from the tip of Muley Point into the 300-foot air, then settling grain by grain at the feet of any other soaring sandstone faces, 21 miles away. In Mexican Hat (pop. 31) and Bluff (pop. 320).

Recumbent inside, I scanned the sky for a starless crevasse to settle and sleep in. But even through my tent’s mesh lining and the geologic particulate of the air, I was fixed on the insistent stars, whose luster here is irrepressible. Natural Bridges National Monument, about 30 miles to the north, is designated a “Gold-tier International Dark Sky Park.” Light pollution is naught; the M33 galaxy is visible to the sharp naked eye and the Zodiacal light is vibrant. So it’s no shock to me now that I can’t recall the underwear I was wearing under my sleeping bag.

The sort worn three years earlier by a tourist at the same spot are unforgotten; well removed from the dirt road, he drove his VW Beetle, wheels and all parts jittering, through sagebrush and over piñon logs, then off Muley Point and into the starless crevasse, meeting the valley floor in a few seconds. He was naked, but had donned a pair of Mickey Mouse boxers, and was found by the Bluff Fire Department after sunrise the following morning. But it could not have been this story that kept me up amidst the stellar display—I hadn’t heard it yet.

Cigarette Springs Road Juniper trees just sort of sit there, twisted in the sand. And the sand itself doesn’t particularly do anything until the summer afternoon thundershower carries it over the rocks (who have themselves done little to nothing for the better part of a few millennia) to the San Juan River.

Hence my sometimes impression that this sprawling canyon system doesn’t much care who drives his small car off one of its cliffs in his underwear or who worships every wind-worn curve of orange stone. It doesn’t discern, maybe, between the conservationist and the oil baron.

I pause at a berm in the dirt road and pour the dirt from my shoes. Imagine myself at 40-something here on the mesa top. Look south: Monument Valley, 160 million years, the Permian period. North: the Abajo Mountains, igneous intrusions, 29 million years. East: Can’t see much, actually. But that little tree is more or less elderly. West: Glen Canyon, 146 million years, Early Jurassic period. Stand in the weightless breeze all day and do nothing but think on those numbers. Weep. I turn around toward my large car and hurry home to make dinner by 7 o’clock.

I go back two months later; the junipers have chalky blue fruits tucked behind their leaves, the sagebrush effuses its smoky odor, and the brown plains have turned sea green. It has rained.

I’m sure that sandstone spire out to the west was a few feet taller last I was here. This may not be so uncaring a place.

Grand Gulch “It was off-season. Hot, dry, no water to speak of, really. Nothing the pack rats hadn’t already shit in. So I wasn’t taking anyone out there, but the German, the French, they’re always out there that time of year. They dink around for artifacts—pots, arrowheads, whatever. One of them came around my place in Bluff one evening wanting to tell me about this fully intact pot he found. It was a good find. Sort of too good—in a ‘Whoops, I wasn’t supposed to see that’ kind of way. He gave me as good a description of its location as he could; a few miles down the main canyon of Grand Gulch. Took me forever to find this thing. He said he was driving to Salt Lake the next day. He got about thirty miles that morning before a truck crossed over into his lane and killed him.”

In its long shadow, by the fire, the image was all; the Frenchman out for a day hike, discovering the perfectly preserved pot, probably ecstatic. His moment meditating on its wide, rounded body finessed into the narrow neck, and the barely discernible fingerprint used to shape the rim impressing upon his mind. That the eve of the day his car collided fatally with another. I didn’t mean to hang upon superstition, but I thought then that perhaps the place cared too much; let the man have his moment.

Centenarian cottonwoods in a ring around me catch the full-bellied breeze. The touchingdown of their spaded leaves is heavy with consequence, the trees themselves rather light, a limb easily removed in a torrid wind. I splash some water in the dirt and traced a shallow circle around and around. Returning, returning, the late light pouring from the pot’s mouth and away.

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The College Hill Independent

US-163 I’ll move back east this summer, but maybe, hopefully, out west again after that. It’s a few years now with this blue-green Toyota, today the heat shimmering over its hood and the tires nearly boiling. I ease off the gas or pull halfway into the shoulder of the highway whenever I pass a semi, or register a wilting bouquet of flowers tied to a cross at the side of the road. Some of those have been there for ages.

Geology of the American Southwest is tucked between the dashboard and the window.

Leaning dangerously forward I reach for the book, fingernails catching the frayed edges before I’m able to pull it close enough to grab. One hand on the steering wheel, one on the geology textbook; it is unsafe driving but such studious danger.

I flip to chapter four, glancing at the road in between long gazes toward the Permian-era Lime Ridge, folded upon itself endlessly toward the sky. It is almost as verdant as its name suggests, though the thick layer of fragmented shale tempers the green with its diffusive grey.

Interesting—halfway through the flip to the next page, the Toyota’s left front tire vibrates on the corrugated divider line in the pavement, ushering me quickly back to my lane. It doesn’t occur to me to put the book in the passenger seat, or even out of sight in the back with the atlases and camp stove, whose metallic rattling has become metronomic if not hypnotic.

Slickhorn Canyon I finessed the image of the cliff above me into something smaller and smaller such that, in the sun’s ubiquity, I could hold its impression in my mind for a moment after closing my eyes. I didn’t wish it were more diminutive or less treacherous, but likewise didn’t quite accept it as it was. I fixated upon a juniper sapling that had found only the slightest ledge—an inch or two deep—to build a life on, and the cliff, open-mouthed behind the juniper like a starless sky, reassumed its real size, perhaps even grew.

At the bottom of this monolith and reposed on my back as I was, it wasn’t as though its simply being there was any danger. In fact I’m inclined to say that its permanence, its stability, and its seemingly impermeable thereness exuded safety. But to exude and to evoke are quite different phenomena, and I think in this case what the sandstone exuded from itself and what it evoked in me were utterly opposed. Or, it could be that to imagine that rocks outwardly express an internal essence is the mistake.

But I cannot undo, in doubt, the following: everything on that canvas, of any size I can render it, was falling. Though the rain is only occasional there—rare, even—over time it leaves thin black ribbons of lichen on the sandstone. I followed their paths top to bottom, ledge to floor, rim to base. Everything falling. Even the juniper, with the very ends of its young branches, stout and defiant in its very presence, cannot but tilt outward and downward.

UT-261 It’s easy enough to stay afloat above the depth of geological numbers that I perceive on the horizon and the page. But that is only until I stop the car on the precipitous side of the Moki Dugway and begin poring over the pages; I read and then gaze, hold close the book and then squint toward the inapprehensible expanse.

That sorrowfully rain-painted cliff, punctuated by the little juniper, was not a monolith; the Colorado Plateau, rather, is a monolith. A 130,000 square mile monolith. Not a single canyon, mountain, cactus, or piñon until, slowly, slowly (how long this all took cannot be overemphasized), rain, wind, and tremors carved it apart. Made impressions, depressions, protrusions. One can’t say there’s any loss in erosion; it’s simply a repeated displacement. At once the constant taking of sediment and the giving of form. The wind cuts at the canyon floor, the cliff grows bigger.

I can see from the designated lookout area on the Dugway decades-old cars overturned at the bottom of the sinuous dirt road. I don’t know the story of each wreck, but I presently neither wish to know them nor think on them for long. They are simple facts and artifacts of the landscape. They will erode and disappear sooner than the Frenchman’s pot, which itself now drinks the light emptying from the sun. There are living, intact cars in sight, too. A truck hurtles across US-163 through the Valley of the Gods toward Bluff. It belongs to a tourist, a hiker, someone returning home having been gone too long.

March 18, 2016

FEATURES

08

TREEKEEPERS Reshaping Providence’s Urban Forest In September 2007, the Providence Parks Department contracted a private company to fly a satellite over the city. The satellite photographed every square foot of the city and sent it to a team at NCDC Imaging, who sorted the pixels into four discrete categories: impervious surface, water, grass, and tree canopy.

A 2008 report called the “State of Providence’s Urban Forest” reported that 23 percent of Providence is covered by tree canopy. For reference, other cities that have employed the Urban Tree Canopy methodology (UTC) include Boston (29 percent), Baltimore (20 percent), New York City (24 percent), and Pittsburgh (38 percent).

Doug Still, Providence’s City Forester, says that the Department has set a goal of reaching 30 percent UTC citywide, though they have yet to set a project deadline. The arguments for increasing Providence’s tree canopy rest on the numerous public health benefits that urban forests provide for their cities. To name a few, higher UTC corresponds with improved air quality, lower urban temperatures, and less stormwater runoff. Still says that trees also provide numerous psychological benefits that are more difficult to define explicitly. “It’s that intangible factor that just makes things more pleasant,” says Still. “If you see a street that’s tree-lined, and then the next street over has similar buildings and infrastructure but no trees, there’s a huge difference.”

An inventory of every tree in Providence, including each tree’s location, species, diameter, and health, was also completed for the “State of Providence’s Urban Forest” report. Tallied on foot by the Parks Department and a team of 100 trained volunteers, Providence’s trees totaled at 24,499 as of May 2006. The inventory is still the working database for the Parks Department’s Forestry Division, who updates it every time they plant a tree.

The report brought two important facts to the Parks Department’s attention.

The first was that Providence is slowly recovering from a massive loss of trees sustained over the last half-century. A 1901 inventory measured an urban forest with upwards of 50,000 trees. Following decades of industrialization, urban growth, and outbreaks of Dutch Elm Disease, Providence’s tree count fell to 16,500 by the mid-1970s, according to estimates by the City Forester from that era.

The 2008 report indicates that recent planting efforts have indeed increased tree counts. The trees that Still’s office plants are selected to make up a more resilient urban forest. Following the decimation wrought by Dutch Elm Disease in the 1950s and ‘60s, City Forestry again overlooked the importance of biodiversity and replanted roughly half of the city’s stock with an invasive species called the Norway Maple. Still’s office currently replaces Norway Maples with a rotating cast of less invasive trees whenever possible. The newfound emphasis on resilience is necessary with a host of dangerous tree pests lurking on the horizon: the emerald ash borer has reached northwestern New York, and the Asian long-horned beetle has come as close as Worcester.

The report also highlighted a second key fact: some neighborhoods have more trees than others. For instance, College Hill and Wayland Square boast lush UTCs upwards of 30 percent, and the Blackstone neighborhood measures in at an impressive 40.1 percent. Combined, the three neighborhoods contain more than one fifth of the city’s UTC. Meanwhile, lower-income neighborhoods such as Washington Park and Upper and Lower South Providence sport the lowest UTCs in the city: 5.9 percent, 10.9 percent, and 9.2 percent, respectively. “Lower tree canopy cover often equates with poverty,” says Still. Judging by the maps in the Urban Forest report, this is essentially a steadfast rule in Providence.

Still is quick to note that some of this disparity is out of his office’s control.

A large portion of trees in Providence’s wealthier neighborhoods are planted on private lawns and the Forestry Division only plants in public spaces. But Still’s office doesn’t deny its responsibility to distribute tree wealth more equitably. A map of street tree density, a statistic that does not include private trees, reflects many of the same inequities highlighted in the UTC-by-neighborhood map.

These maps exist because the Parks Department devoted substantial resources to make them, and through a public-private partnership known as the Providence Neighborhood Planting Program (PNPP) the Forestry Division and their volun-

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teers have begun deliberately planting in low-UTC neighborhoods for essentially the first time in Providence’s history. +++ According to their website, PNPP was founded in 1988 “as a means of providing a consistent match of Providence Parks Department funds for the continued planting of street trees in Providence at a grassroots level.” The funds that match city money come from the Mary Elizabeth Sharpe Street Tree Endowment, which is, according to PNPP’s Director Cassie Tharinger, entirely bestowed by local philanthropist Peggy Sharpe.

PNPP provides free trees to groups of more than five neighbors who fill out a Neighborhood Street Tree Award Application. If an application is accepted, a mix of city workers and volunteers plant trees in the strips of grass between the sidewalk and curb. On streets where lawn strips are either nonexistent or too narrow to foster a tree, PNPP will cut wider berths in the sidewalk.

PNPP recently announced an explicit approach to planting trees where they’re needed most. The organization now prioritizes applications from the following ten neighborhoods: Elmwood, Smith Hill, Federal Hill, Valley, Olneyville, Washington Park, Reservoir, the West End, and Upper and Lower South Providence. However, identifying target neighborhoods is not an act of public service by itself, and following through has proven surprisingly difficult for PNPP. Despite offering trees and planting assistance for free, PNPP has struggled to attract applicants from neighborhoods with low UTC cover.

Still attributes much of this discrepancy to a lack of awareness about PNPP. Members of PNPP present at various community meetings but they do not devote any of their budget to conventional advertising. Awareness is also only one part of the problem.

PNPP’s Neighborhood Street Tree Award Application requires time and resource dedication that might discourage low-income residents and more transient renters. PNPP provides free trees on the condition that residents mulch, weed, and feed each tree 20 gallons of water per week, a commitment far less costly than the price of a new tree but a cost nonetheless. Furthermore, tenants cannot apply for trees without a signature from their property owner. Absentee landlords can be difficult or even impossible to reach for a signature. PNPP also only offers an English version of the application, despite the fact that English is not the first language of many residents in Providence’s lower-income neighborhoods.

In the interest of lessening the applicant’s load, Tharinger plans to translate the application into Spanish and Portuguese and to draft a stock letter that interested tenants could send to their landlords.

PNPP has succeeded in finding committed leaders in their target neighborhoods. Tharinger calls them “tree people.” PNPP recently connected with a tree person in Washington Park who requested 50 trees for her neighborhood and intends to organize more plantings. A different resident in Lower South Providence has orchestrated the planting of over 90 trees in his neighborhood. But PNPP’s community leaders have a difficult time assembling the volunteer labor and five signatures of property owners required to file a Neighborhood Street Tree Award Application. Still hopes that as PNPP does more work in low-UTC neighborhoods, the organization’s name will spread via word of mouth and more residents will warm to the idea of signing on. +++ Across all neighborhoods, PNPP plants roughly 500 trees a year, which is their full capacity according to Still. Accounting for additional public plantings done outside of PNPP, Doug Still estimates that the Forestry Division plants 600 trees a year. This total outweighs the 450-500 trees that the Forestry Division removes annually, though not by a wide margin.

In a good year, Groundwork, a community-based non-profit environmen-

The College Hill Independent

by Ben Berke illustration by Yuko Okabe tal organization, can contribute an additional 75 trees to the effort. Because Groundwork sells its trees at cost to tenants and homeowners, they are able to plant on private property if they want to, opening up a huge proportion of land in low-UTC neighborhoods that PNPP cannot plant on. By Rose’s estimation, Groundwork and PNPP are the only organizations planting a significant number of trees in low-UTC neighborhoods. Rose considers the two organizations to be “very much aligned.”

By Still’s calculation, it may require as many as 40,000 new trees to achieve a 30 percent urban tree canopy cover in Providence. Unsurprisingly, if PNPP wishes to reach their goal in a timely manner and significantly increase UTC in their target neighborhoods, they will need more money to do what Still calls “contractor planting”. Unlike the volunteer-staffed planting orchestrated by PNPP, contractor planting does not require residential involvement. Under this alternative model, the Forestry Division receives funding separate from PNPP’s sources and pays private workers to plant and maintain trees in low-UTC neighborhoods where PNPP has failed to attract applicants. In this sense the circumvention of residential involvement is an advantage, but it also has its downsides. +++ As noble as PNPP’s intentions are, the effects of street tree plantings in PNPP’s target neighborhoods must be thoughtfully examined. Oftentimes, public investments do not reach the residents for whom they are intended. Last month, the Independent reported on public outcry against Mayor Elorza’s Everyhome program, which highlighted the potential perils of investing in low-income neighborhoods without community involvement.

According to a press release published in October, Everyhome is “a suite of tools [that puts] local businesses to work rehabilitating and filling every boarded and abandoned property in the City of Providence.” The Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), a Providence-based advocacy group for low-income families in communities of color, rallied at City Hall and called for 50% of Everyhome’s housing units to be designated low-income affordable. Elorza’s administration has not committed to any affordability benchmark. Residents worry that houses rehabilitated through Everyhome will sell for prices that members of their community can’t afford. Many also worry that these renovations will attract other investments in their community not intended for them—investments that may eventually price them out of their homes.

The rally DARE organized called attention to a recurring catch-22: without sufficient affordable housing, investments intended to improve quality of life in a renting neighborhood can inadvertently displace many of its residents. Even entirely generous investments like free tree plantings can galvanize residential displacement and gentrification.

This happens because street trees increase property value. A 2010 study by economists Geoffrey Donovan and David Butry estimated that, holding all else constant, lining a street with trees increases the average home price on that street by $7,130. Though Donovan and Butry used data exclusively from Portland’s housing market, the study’s generalizability was touted in coverage by the Wall Street Journal and Atlantic Media’s Citylab. A follow-up study in 2011 estimated that the addition of a single street tree in front of a property increases monthly rent by $21. Donovan and Butry’s estimates suggest that tree plantings can significantly contribute to or even catalyze residential turnover.

Pointing out the potentially harmful effects of investment in a neighborhood is not meant to discourage infrastructure improvements in underserved neighborhoods. Instead, it aims to underscore the importance of investing in affordable housing contemporaneously with other neighborhood investments. PNPP and Groundwork hope to even out the distribution of valuable public goods like trees across Providence. Providing affordable housing does not fall within the domain of those organizations. Ensuring that the intended residents can afford to reap the benefits of PNPP and Groundwork’s investments is a responsibility that falls to Elorza’s administration.

BEN BERKE B’16 will be volunteering at the next planting day, April 9, in Mount Hope.

March 18, 2016

METRO

10

ON BEING

LOST

by Gabrielle Hick, Patrick McMenamin, & Dominique Pariso

Field Notes from an Exploration of the Rhode Island Craigslist’s Lost and Found Page Somebody found a tool bag in Cranston, which “definitely belongs to a plumber or electrician,” but in order to reclaim the bag you must identify all the tools.

A grandparent found three darts on Gano St. in Providence. If the darts mean a lot to you, describe them and you can have them back, “if not [he/she] can give them to [his/her] grandson.”

Sal is looking for a colander that she must have left on a bus stop bench in Pawtucket, across from the Slater Mill.

There’s a $75 cash reward for its safe return—apparently it has sentimental value.

A second-floor apartment was robbed in Woonsocket, the robber(s) taking between “200-300 record albums” and “binders of baseball cards.”

Missing cat named “Plywood” in Johnston R.I. Disappeared February 25th.

Update: He came home, a week later. Even though Plywood was an inside cat, he “survived the snow, thunder & lightning, the extreme elements.” Lost and then found: “don’t give up hope, people.”

“Looking for my Dad” is the caption for a picture posted on the site. The dad in question, whose face is blurred out, has one hand resting on a silver Toyota. Apparently “he worked for a car dealership,” but the car he sold to his son or daughter “is a lemon. Doesn’t run anymore.”

Another father is looking for his “lucky hat.” Posted online by a helpful son or daughter, the notice says that he “was driving his car with the top down on 95 South near the 6-10 connector” when a gust of wind blew the hat right off of his head. Apparently he is “totally distraught without it.”

If you catch a flash of blue while you’re driving down the highway, it might be a hat, a lucky one. “Please stop and pick it up.”

A “lovely dove flew away she’s all white with a little black on her tail very friendly.” If you’re in the Manton/Olneyville area, keep an eye out for a dove that strikes you with its particular comeliness. –GH

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Labyrinths and Maizes The first ever modern-day corn maze was the brainchild of Don Frantz. He constructed it at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania. His website, americanmaze.com, boasts that the designs are both: “The original and still the best … getting people lost since 1993!” It should also be noted that this is the official maze of The Farmer’s Almanac.

Corn mazes conjure images of sugar-addled kids running around fairgrounds; too short to get on the rust bucket rides named after verbs and natural disasters like The Zipper or The Cyclone, or the more scientific-sounding Gravitron. The kids’ energy, fueled by endless gastronomical options: cotton candy, candy apples, funnel cake, shaved ice, gyros, corndogs, pizza, curly fries, popcorn, etc.

Although, if we want to take it back a bit, the corn maze is really just an extension of the hedge maze made popular in England during the Middle Ages. Noblemen constructed these mazes, elaborate and decadent, in gardens to entertain guests and pass the time.

Go back further still: you’ll see that after the fall of the Roman Empire mazes got flattened out, taken from threedimensional structures to paintings made on the floors and walls of spiritual buildings. These symbolic mazes evolved into metaphors for sin or pilgrimage. Technically speaking, these patterns were more like labyrinths. The difference between a labyrinth and a maze has to do with entrances: a labyrinth should have only one, while a maze can have many. But they accomplish the same thing in the end, regardless of where you start.

Rewind just a bit further and we’ll get to the mother of them all. The Labyrinth of Knossos. Daedalus, the original know-it-all, designed it for King Minos of Crete to house the Minotaur, the illegitimate consequence of Queen Pasiphae’s unholy union with a bull. It is said that Daedalus constructed the labyrinth so cunningly that he himself could barely manage to escape it after it was built. In the center housed the Minotaur, which Theseus managed to slay after being gifted a ball of thread by King Minos’ daughter.

The last time I was in a corn maze, I saw a young, toeheaded kid launch himself at the wall of corn, his worldview still being shaped and deceived by cartoons; he hung suspended for one glorious moment, as the stalks bent against his weight before flinging him back down to Earth. Not gifted with a sense of direction or a sense for algorithms, I paid ten dollars to get lost for nearly two hours. Money well spent to simulate wandering.

But here’s a hint, in case you ever get lost in a maze: don’t rely on anything as flimsy as thread. Instead, extend your arm, keep one hand, left or right, on the wall and follow it all the way out. –DP

Un-lost “Love is lost” sang David Bowie in one of his last singles before we, too, lost such an alien pop star visitor. Harper Lee, Nancy Reagan, Antonin Scalia, losses to our cultural memory are piling up and—with them, re-evaluations of how and why we’re invested in certain icons. Pasts come leaking out and I find myself watching clips of Nancy Reagan saying wildly homophobic things about the AIDS crisis. Absently, I’m googling phrases such as “primaries update” and re-opening The Intercept’s “The Drone Papers” and glossing slowly over long lists of stats about US military investments and mass incarceration stats. A certain amount of time is lost.

Everything lost tends to sneak back up with the new. We find history showing us all the people who knew all along, who either wanted things to be lost or didn’t quite get how the whole process of history was about to stack up. (Exxon knew about climate change as early as 1977.)—A friend says there’s even a word for this, agnotology.

So maybe let’s take a minute to mention everything that’s not lost right now. Ice cream. Empanadas. Baklava. Falafel.

The Downtown Boys. Making out standing up. Web comics.

Sincere teenage zines. There’s lots of good things we hope are not forgotten.

And not to hedge, it’s worth mentioning what lets me publicly present such nice things. The College Hill Independent receives funding from and is predominantly staffed by students who attend Brown University. Ask any student activist worth their salt and they’ll tell you that the university only exists as it does by way of a very rich elite, sciences funded heavily by US military research initiatives, investments in corporations who own private prisons and coal mines, tax breaks and zoning laws that let it roll over lots of local Providence politics. (I’m serious when I say to ask someone, others can give you much more detailed figures about the mechanics of such complicity and listening to them is sort of the whole point to begin with.)

There’s a way thinking about such things that sticks me in the same kind of emotional morass as trying to think through what it feels like to be someone like the speechwriter for Donald Trump’s campaign. I want to say I have too many feelings and I don’t know where to put them but I know that’s unhelpful and expresses a specific set of privileges. Admitting complicity is not enough to become un-lost. The way responsibility and feeling get passed down in such a situation make it by and large impossible for direct emotional response to have much real value.

Where does any of this leave us? If I say lost I feel like I’m admitting a type of defeat and I’d be best to spend the rest of my time in a mush of scrolling feelings, misdirected and useless. Suddenly I’ve found myself scoping out too fast, my hands no longer run along any kind of corn-maze walls. Love is lost. -PM

The College Hill Independent

THE TUTOR WEARS PRADA Education as Commodity in Hong Kong On a Saturday evening in February, dozens of teenagers line up outside translucent glass doors. Some chatter with their neighbors. Others stare at their phones. Still more are anxiously tapping their feet, shifting their weight from one foot to the other.

The doors open.

The teenagers take a seat, and take out meticulously organized papers. The television at the front of the room blinks on, and a figure begins speaking down to them from the screen. They fall silent and stare, wide-eyed, entranced by the fluid, enchanting speech issuing forth from the figure. For the next hour and a half, these teenagers scribble on their papers silently, furiously, as though trying to capture every syllable.

The man on the screen looks like a 30-year-old pop star. His hair is jet-black and streaked with copper highlights; his skin is flawless; his speech is casual and intelligent, peppered with pop culture references, adolescent slang, and witty remarks. A man that parents and children whisper about—they know about his yellow Lamborghini, which has his name emblazoned on the license plate, and his love for Louis Vuitton.

The man on the screen is Richard Eng, the 50-yearold founder of Beacon College, one of the first tutoring centers in Hong Kong. Since 1996, he has been teaching English to the thousands of secondary school students who have flocked to his classes—which, somewhat incongruously, are taught almost entirely in Cantonese.

His classes are so popular that only a handful of students are able to access live instruction due to safety regulations and spatial constraints. The rest must settle for a livestream in another room, or else watch replays of the lectures on their own time. +++ Welcome to the world of Hong Kong’s shadow education, ruled by tutor kings and queens who boast student lists thousands of names long. Their faces peer down at you from billboards, then from the side of a bus, and again from the walls of a subway station. They all have the same flawless skin and shiny black hair. Their gaze is captivating and seductive; they smile like they know something you don’t.

Almost all of them work for tutoring centers dotted throughout the city, which open their doors each evening to accommodate 80 percent of Hong Kong’s secondary school students. These tutoring centers are the drivers of the system of supplementary tutoring in Hong Kong, an industry that pulls in over $260 million USD per year.

The financial and social rewards reaped by tutors in the industry are prodigious: the average tutor earns double the salary of a regular schoolteacher, and the most famous celebrity tutors are multimillionaires. Tony Chow, a 30-year-old English tutor at Modern Education (one of the largest tutorial centers in Hong Kong), charges up to $75 for four hour-long classes a month—which, when multiplied by a student list thousands of names long, translates to big money. Y.Y. Lam, a tutor at Beacon College who teaches Chinese literature classes to over ten thousand students, was offered nearly $11 million in 2013 when Modern Education attempted to poach him and his clients from Beacon College. (He humbly decided, however, that the $4.6 million he was earning at the time was enough, and turned down the offer.)

These tutors amass not only fortune, but also fame: many have cult-like followings comprised of students and parents alike. Y.Y. Lam has one of the most recognizable faces in Hong Kong, and he is often inundated by teenaged fans when he emerges in public.

Alan Chan, a tutor with King’s Glory Education (another renowned tutorial center), is known for his magnetism and charisma, and for his ability to captivate and inspire students in lectures. His students treat him with attention and adoration: they give him collages and frosted cupcakes on his birthday, and often ask to have a picture with him at the end of tutoring sessions. These tutors are gushed about, admired, and worshipped; they are the students’ idols and saviors.

March 18, 2016

+++ But saviors from what? It would seem unlikely that Hong Kong’s teenagers, who demonstrate incredible academic prowess, would need much help. The educational system in Hong Kong is lauded as one of the best in the world, with its students consistently outperforming their Western counterparts and putting up scores that are neck-and-neck with those of their East Asian peers. In a 2012 report published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the scores of Hong Kong’s students topped the charts in all three learning domains: mathematics, reading, and science.

In a 2015 report—this time, the largest-ever global educational ranking report—Hong Kong came second, trailing closely behind Singapore.

Students in Hong Kong grow up with exams, all in preparation for the grand finale that will determine their future career and life prospects. The secondary education of Hong Kong’s students concludes with a college entrance examination administered by the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessments Authority.

A student’s score on the final exam determines not just where the student will go to university, but whether or not that student will be able to secure a place at a university in Hong Kong at all. Since 1994, the number of publicly funded university spaces has been capped at 15,000 students, which means that only 18 percent of the city’s students are able to study at a government-funded institution.

For wealthier students, this can be nothing more than a slight setback: however they fare on the exams, they can look abroad for more options, with many choosing to go to Australia, Canada, or the United Kingdom. But for the less well-off, poor test scores can mean the end of their dreams for the future. As Y.Y. Lam put it: “This exam determines the student’s entire career.

One mistake can mean a life sentence; it can mean that his entire life is spent in poverty.”

The future of the student thus hangs on a thread; she has little control of her fate. With so much at stake, it is perhaps only natural that she should turn to a higher power that can help her out of her predicament—a higher power that, in this case, presents itself as a young, charming tutor with perfectly tousled hair, dressed head to toe in designer clothing.

by Natalie Tsang illustration by Yuko Okabe

in Hong Kong over the past two decades. A study conducted in August 2015 (before the start of the school year) revealed that 25 percent of students had extremely high levels of stress, with 30 percent saying that they thought they were “going to go crazy”. Another recent survey interviewed nearly ten thousand secondary school students in Hong Kong, and discovered that 24 percent of them have had suicidal thoughts; 51 percent of respondents also showed signs of mild to major depression. The students’ fear of failure and poverty has thus transformed into desperation and helplessness. They will do whatever they can to ensure that, in a year or two, this fear and psychological turmoil will be but a distant memory.

The tutors are all too aware of this fear, and they capitalize on it. In the market-driven society that is Hong Kong, education has been commodified, and knowledge is nothing more than hints, tips, tricks, and shortcuts for the exam. Going to school is no longer enough; to keep up with the university-bound tide, private tutoring sessions are now essential. Tutoring centers have shifted the bell curve and raised the educational baseline; the tutors have created the necessity for their own existence.

Tutoring is the latest installment in a veritable educational arms race. But the resulting structure is inherently biased, marginalizing those who can’t afford tutoring services, hindering their chances at university admission (and thus at well-paying work), such that they are less likely to pay for the tutoring of their own children.

Meanwhile, the children of the wealthy are helped on the way to replicating their parents’ success. Inequality is perpetuated, and social mobility stifled. The big winners in this cycle are the tutors themselves, and the handful of top-scoring students who get their names published in the paper when results come out. One graduating class goes off to college; the rest are forgotten. +++ It is yet another Saturday night, perhaps one, two, maybe five years later. Dozens of teenagers can be seen lining up outside the translucent glass doors of Beacon College. They all dress and look more or less the same, with neat, plain black hair, awkwardly oversized school uniforms, and bags under their eyes. There is an anxious murmuring; a frenzied stillness pervades the air.

The doors open. A clean-cut, bright-eyed, pictureperfect tutor welcomes in the students with a warm, reassuring smile and kind voice.

The tension in the air dissipates, if only for a moment. The students smile shyly and respectfully when they greet the tutor. They take out meticulously organized papers. The tutor strides to the front of the room. She begins to speak.

The students fall silent in reverence and relief.

Where there is fear, there is often also idol worship.

The gods of destiny in the Fragrant Harbor return year after year in their humble outfit of test scrolls detailed with multiple-choice bubbles and lined pages.

Well-intentioned parents, wanting only the best for their children, give whatever they can to protect them from the threat of future misery and poverty; the students, trembling with fear and uncertainty in their dull, unpolished dress shoes, turn again and again to their earthly idols and guardian angels. And Y.Y. Lam, Richard Eng, and Alan Chan—along with all those other glamorous saviors clothed in Louis Vuitton and Chanel— will be ready, as always, to welcome them into their arms.

NATALIE TSANG B’18 can’t handle exams.

+++ Given the cutthroat competition between teenagers to secure a place in university, as well as the clear divide between the winners and the losers in the system, it is unsurprising that tutorial centers have proliferated

OCCULT

12

DISEASE IS NOT THE ONLY DERIVATIVE OF HER I have to become everything.

I have to become everything.

The hysteric body is its own capacity to distort and manipulate itself. To bend.

Art is its own capacity to distort and manipulate itself. To bend.

Hysteria: a memory of trauma, mutated into irregular and fantastic bodily symptoms. The mind becoming the body. The body becoming a physiological theater, a stage on which the hysteric’s neuroses play out. Hysteria: not only the body itself, but also the body performing itself.

Art: a memory mutated into irregular and fantastic physicalities. The artist’s body and materials becoming a physiological theater, a stage on which the mind can play itself out, perform itself.

Art: the body performing the mind.

Female hysterics used the body as a subversive language in a political climate that rejected and disbelieved the stories they told. In a world where sexual trauma at the hands of men was often considered the fault of those who possessed female anatomy, the narratives of female bodies were easily inhumed. Hysteria: using use the body as a tool to rebel against a silencing.

The hysteric body: a transcending of sense and silence. A bending.

An illness of the womb. The body as a liar. A life lived through a physical form forced into images. An imitation of epilepsy. A spectacle of all ailments at once. A kinetic language. A kind of speech. A way of saying something. A refusal to communicate.

A resistance. A defense. A repression. A censorship. Emotional excess. Multiple and paradoxical: starving and swollen, manic and exhausted, ecstatic and terrible. A kinetic discourse. A divine specificity. A charm. A projection. An art.

There was a kink in the thing that was a girl.

It is important to remember that the thing that was a girl may not have been a girl at all.

It is important to remember that most studies on hysterics focus exclusively on white, cisgendered, heterosexual women.

The people encased in female bodies are not always the people we think they are, or the people we attempt to make them become. The thing that was a girl may have been someone else entirely.

What is going to happen to the women. Could you fasten them down for me. I was going to escape being one.

French-American artist Louise Joséphine Bourgeois described her work as a fear of falling, and then as the art of falling. Like many artists, historically and today, Bourgeois

13

ARTS

Women artists use the body as a subversive language in cultures across the world that reject and disbelieve the stories they tell. In a world where trauma and illness are often considered the fault of women, women’s narratives are easily inhumed. Art: using the body as a tool to rebel against a silencing.

Art: a transcending of sense and silence. A bending.

associated womanhood and femininity with being female, and championed the image of straight, white, cisgendered women in her art, to the exclusion of many others. (It is fair for her work to depict her interpretation of femininity, but it is also fair to challenge her interpretation as reductive and exclusionary.)

female anatomy to prettiness, to mainstream femininity, to something essentially good.

Bourgeois’ subjects dealt largely with female reproductive anatomy. Le Regard (1966), sculpted with latex and cloth, is a round figure, slitted down the middle so that a lumpy object is visible inside, linking the image of the eye opening (le regard: the gaze) and the image of birth.

I loved myself. I was self-sufficient. I fucked myself. I was independent. A thing needing no thing. A crewelwork thing locking long on her who wore me.

The piece is not gentle. It is mud-brown, rough, distorted.

Split open. An assertion: the genesis of sight (of opening oneself and seeing) is buried within the female body, and it is neither pink nor soft, but it is monstrous and sacred.

Bourgeois takes the body and ruins it, mangles it, disfigures it.

This is anatomy that defies femininity.

“For me, sculpture is the body,” Bourgeois says, “My body is my sculpture.”

The hysteric makes the body strange and unfamiliar, and, by doing so, gives it voice. Bourgeois does the same in the vandalism of the body that is Le Regard. She makes the body speak. The piece is a fuck-you to anybody who would reduce

Art complicates femininity. This is a threat.

Hysteria complicates the female body. This is a threat.

In 1993, Bourgeois created her Arch of Hysteria with bronze and silver nitrate patina. It is a headless figure suspended from the ceiling, physiologically androgynous, laced with tension, but physically vulnerable. A body both immobile and open.

Maybe I already have what she’s having.

Bourgeois self-identified as a hysteric, and spent decades in analysis. Selections of her writings on this experience are exhibited alongside her installations. Bourgeois wrote “I have failed as a wife as a woman as a mother as a hostess as an artist,” And then:

The College Hill Independent

by Isabelle Doyle illustration by Juan Tang Hon

“I am afraid of silence I am afraid of the dark I am afraid to fall down I am afraid of insomnia I am afraid of emptiness.”

Her bronze Janus Fleuri (1968), an abstruse form evocative of sex and metamorphosis, today hangs above Freud’s couch at the Freud museum in London. The material product of a hysterical body, now suspended above the place where hysteria was “resolved.”

Bourgeois claimed Freud’s patients were maggots.

Bourgeois claimed maggots were symbols of resurrection.

I even am a girl. Wow, fuck me.

In his best-known case study, Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’), Sigmund Freud posits that Dora’s hysteric loss of speech is a result of the repression of her desire.

During her analysis, Dora, an adolescent girl, informs Freud that when Herr K, a middle-aged man, propositioned her, she responded by slapping him in the face. Freud tells her, “You are afraid of Herr K; you are even more afraid of yourself, of the temptation to yield to him.”

You are even more afraid of yourself.

Of the temptation to yield to him.

In heat a lady. Tits swinging, White udders...Woman make me...

Walled-in by her own substance.

Later on in the case study, Freud claims that Dora projected her feelings of anger and vengeance for Herr K onto him, Freud.

I think it’s possible he was projecting his own feelings of fear onto Dora.

Perhaps Freud was terrified of his inability to understand the disease and desire he believed were derivative of Dora.

Perhaps he sought to make female yearning more palatable, by implying that this yearning would end with a yielding.

Something Dora herself would do well to be afraid of.

Maybe psychoanalysis itself was the projection. An attempt to make the feminine something safer.

Willing a body to come out of the word worries the old magics but you have to.

FKA Twigs, a singer-songwriter and dancer who creates mainly within the aesthetic tradition of Afrofuturism, describes her sound as “putting [her] voice on certain atmospheres.” Her music videos are complex, visceral, rife with symbolism, and often have a meditation on feminine desire at their core. She floods her face with liquid mercury, straddles a prisoner dying of lethal injection, gives birth to a line of colorful scarves. She is weird, and lovely, and explosive.

In most of her (usually self-directed) videos, Twigs makes a visual spectacle of herself. In “Pendulum,” she swings from the ceiling and writhes on the floor, bound entirely by her own hair. In “I’m your doll,” she dresses up as a blow-up doll, while she spends most of “Two Weeks” sitting in a throne, her entire lower body immobile, evoking paralysis.

Twigs uses her videos to comment on a tradition of being exposed, a tradition of submissiveness: she exhibits herself as a creature who needs a partner, or a master, to complete her, as she does in many of her lyrics, which express desire not only as a form of want, but also of lack (“He told me I was so small / I told him Water me”; “So lonely trying to be yours / When you’re looking for so much more,”). She expresses a longing to be taken in hand, to be possessed (“I’m your sweet / Little love-maker,” “Dress me up / I’m your doll”). She could be nodding to Freud, an ironic acknowledgment that her convulsive, hysteric dance, her hysteric body, is a symptom of her sexual desire.

(You are even more afraid of yourself.

But there is no fear, here, in the temptation to yield. Twigs’ submission manifests irrevocable power. By being the “slave,” the “other,” she gives herself the power to rebel. Her throne is surrounded by miniature dancing versions of herself, limbs free and expansive, totally autonomous. Her blow-up doll is not static, but undulating, twisting, perpetually shapeshifting: a physiological refusal to take on one form, to be something that is easily understood. By virtue of her submission, she is subversive.

We know that hysteria, like art, has ties to the body (a body in “passionate movement,” a body as sculpture) and to sex (a memory of sexual trauma becoming symptomatic, a bodily act that results in creation). Lisa Yuskavage claims that art is “a struggle filtered through the self.”

And she does not operate in the same artistic tradition as Bourgeois. The “feminist” movement both inside and outside the art world is historically white, middle-class, and exclusionary. Twigs doesn’t fuck with this.

A body bound by itself.

The world ricocheted off me.

She claims that art is a struggle filtered through the self.

I have begun to think of hysteria the same way. Hysteria is something that must be produced. In order to produce something, you have to be a generative force.

She subverts not only patriarchal notions of femininity, but she also subverts a feminism that is both overtly and insidiously white. She uses the science fiction of Afrofuturism (her multiple selves, the birthing of strange objects) to reexamine the presence of Black feminine identity in our culture. She rejects not only the notion of the “traditional” woman, but the notion of the “acceptable” woman. The white woman. The colorless woman. She flirts with the art world in transgressive pieces like M3LL155X, a sixteen-minute film that explores dominance, submission, and creative sexuality (Twigs as pregnant, sex doll, dominatrix), yet releases pop records on big labels like Young Turks. She mutates traditional spheres of production, walking in all worlds.

Twigs isn’t here for us. Her condition is one of mastery. She will not be qualified or contained. Her hysteria is a bodily revolt, the assertion of an unacceptable body. Mainstream white “feminism” attempts to erase a Black feminine identity, so Twigs becomes a palimpsest, writing herself over traditional femininity in a language that transcends not only white power, but white feminism as well, further complicating our understanding (or lack thereof ) of femininity.

She refuses to simplify herself in order to help us understand her. Her particular hysteria is not a refusal to communicate, but a refusal to be understood.

A woman whose features possess a disturbing combination of ugliness and sensuality. A woman whose desire to fuck exceeds the desires of others to fuck her.

Lisa Yuskavage is a painter of vulgar women.

Yuskavage, a 53-year-old New York City artist, came under fire in the 1990s for her overtly sexualized figure paintings of naked women, which many feminists claimed were “soft porn” and harmful to the movement for equality.

Yuskavage’s subjects are buxom, faces blurred, cartoonishly womanly, obscenely pregnant, legs splayed wide open. The feminine body as both ruly and unruly: perfect according to the dictates of the male gaze, and yet also embodying something strange and terrible. Something powerful in its weird charms. Her use of vivid, artificial color. The earnest artlessness of her subjects, peeking over slender shoulders, eager for their nude skins to be manifested. There is something dangerous in their fearlessness, their willingness to be revealed. There is something dangerous in their implicit paradox, innocence colliding with sensuality. This parallels the paradox of the symptoms of the hysterical body: wild, ecstatic movements followed by episodes of paralysis. Women shaking with cold, while complaining of burning fevers.

(A struggle filtered through the self.

A self hysterically arched.

A thousand colorful scarves, an eye blinking open in the recesses of the female, a birth that never ends.)

For someone to have done something with her own blood.

This essay is exhausting for me to write, because I know that it can never be whole or finished. It is impossible for me to give a definition of hysteria, just as it is impossible for me to give a definition of women. I’m afraid of leaving something out, of leaving somebody out. I’m afraid of the temptation to universalize. Of my desire to yield to it.

It is not easy to be honest because it is impossible to be complete.

I can’t say what makes a hysteric. I can’t say what femininity is. I’m not even sure if either of them exist, outside of a network of constructed binaries.

I can’t say what makes a woman, or what makes a female, or whether it is women or females who are intrinsically linked to the feminine, or if neither of them are. I have written about female bodies and women, but I am not sure if either of these exist, either.

At the same time, I know that I am a woman.

There are few things I am more sure of, or more proud of.

I actually want to be a woman even though I am supposed to be one.

I can’t say what makes an artist. There isn’t a way for me to get it right.

I can’t say what makes a hysteric. But I believe there are concatenations.

What if the inevitable link between female hysterics and women artists is the implicit generative force? The ability to create, to change, to grow? To be both melancholic and luminous, both ugly and ecstatic? What if what enables women to be artists and hysterics is a fundamental complexity, the capacity to be all things?

I have to become everything.

What can women do to the body when we are making something, whether it be physical expression, artistic product, or both? Can we follow in the tradition of the female hysterics, and make the body say something? Can we dictate how you perceive it? Can we change the body itself, or only your conception of it? Does it even matter? Are we powerful?

Do we have power when we dance, when we compose, when we flail, when we burn up, when we sculpt?

As with hysterics, there is something dangerous pushing through the body.

Do I have power when I write? Do I have power as I am writing this?

“If you think of yourself as “good,”” Yuskavage says, “You should think about how easily you could be evil under different circumstances.”

Does every artist have a kind of hysteric power, something we can access through the act of creating?

“Our shit does stink,” she says, “And on top of that it’s rotten.”

An animal secretes a lot of cortisol if you harass her too much in killing her and this ruins the meat you are trying to turn her into.

If her flesh can be ruined because of how marauded she feels can the air be ruined if she cries out inside it.

If I am a hysteric, what does that do to my body? What does creation, of art, of symptom, of anything, mean for the body creating it?

I love to write. My whole body writes.

My whole body writes.

Of the temptation to yield to him.)

March 18, 2016

ARTS

14

AND HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL? On AI and Mental Health Care The word “therapy” might evoke some archaic characters and images: the patient lying on a leather couch, the older male therapist brandishing a pipe, a beard, and bookshelves full of decades of psychoanalytic theory. One person speaks. The other mostly listens. Though the pipe, the couch, and the theory have (mostly) fallen to the wayside, the presence of two people has been a constant in psychotherapy and mental health care.

But things change. And while the rise of cell phones and Skype have bred moments of controversy in mental health care, the introduction of technology into psychological and psychiatric care seems a logical, if not necessary thing. The use of telecommunications in therapy has become a question of how, not why. Last fall, as reported by the MIT Technology Review, Google Life Sciences hired Thomas Insel, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, to help bring data analytics to bear on psychiatric diagnosis. But the development of Multisense, a computational tool from the University of Southern California and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has introduced another question: what place does artificial intelligence have in mental health care? +++ To read a person’s expressions and gestures is the closest we get to mind reading. We expect faces to convey important information. A raised eyebrow, a smile, and a nose wrinkled in disgust are just a few of the many signs we take in without a thought. Someone looks away or smiles half-heartedly, and through some mix of cultural conditioning and intuition, we understand something they’re not saying.

USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies aims to make a computerized tool that can recognize these signs as well as, and maybe one day better than, humans. These rules can be abstracted and ‘taught’ to computers through machine learning. Developed at USC, the Multisense system evaluates users’ physical movements and vocal tics for indicators of mental disorders. The product looks like something from The Terminator: a camera screen maps red lines and green meshes over parts of the face, while meters and gauges that look like the dashboard of a car measure “Gaze Attention” and “Body Movement.” In a demo video, an interviewee leans backwards and bright green block letters reading “LEAN BACKWARDS” flash in response.

For Louis-Phillipe Morency, a principal researcher on the project, one of the primary goals for Multisense was to recognize patterns of nonverbal behaviors that are common among people experiencing depression and PTSD The group published a study in 2013 in which participants with depression, anxiety, and PTSD smiled with significantly less intensity than participants who were not experiencing these conditions.

The Multisense system was integrated into another USC project: SimSensei. The program presents the interviewee with a virtual counselor named Ellie. An avatar of a woman with an even speaking voice and a beige cardigan, Ellie sits in a virtual armchair and goes through the steps of the clinical interview.

All the while, she monitors the patient’s reactions and modifies her responses based on the physical cues they give her. In a demo video clip published on the Atlantic’s website, Ellie asks a young man to remember the last time he felt “really happy.”

“I don’t know,” he says, after a brief pause. He looks away from the camera and several patches on the screen begin to flicker as he turns his head to the side. The screen—this part isn’t visible to the interviewee—reads: “Low Gaze Attention is detected…”

March 18, 2016

Colors change and markers go off as the man becomes distressed.

“I noticed you were hesitant on that one. Would you say you’re generally happy?”

“I’m generally happy,” the words stumble out arhythmically, “but there are…things, just keeping me down.”

The demo ends there. +++ Appearances aside, Ellie is not a therapist. Both in a lecture at Carnegie Mellon and in an interview with the Atlantic, Morency stresses that SimSensei and MultiSense are “decision support tools” and not “decision making tools.” Instead, the system is meant as a “scaleable” aid to help therapists and clinicians decide what to do. This nuance is lost in some headlines, ranging from “Would you Want a Computerized Psychologist?” to “DARPA” to “Troubled Soldiers: Meet your New Simulated Therapist.” In an email interview with the Independent, Morency wrote that he sees a future in which SimSensei can provide objective measures of mental illness, comparable to a blood test. But it seems like those objective measures would have to be developed before SimSensei could be applied clinically.

“In the short-term,” he sees it as an aid, not a substitute, for a clinician. He then laughs and adds that he “would not want a computer to make that decision,” referring to the judgment of whether or not a person is depressed. +++ What Ellie does is monitor interviewees for changes in nonverbal behaviors and speech patterns that Morency’s group believes to be more common in people with mental disorders.

These descriptors (e.g. looking downwards instead of straight ahead) were found by looking at which behaviors were more common in participants who had been diagnosed with depression and PTSD. But according to the paper, these participants were recruited through a Craigslist ad, with no mention of demographic information. And though this research is in its early stages, it points to a challenge in finding automatic descriptors for conditions that might look different depending on age, gender, or culture. What physical signs, if any, can fit all kinds of people? When it comes to how MultiSense deals with the effects of culture, the USC group has made steps in that direction.

In a 2014 study, Morency’s group studied the effect of gender on nonverbal expressions of people with PTSD and depression; they found that men who are depressed frown more than men who are not, while women who are depressed frown less than women who are not. The same study acknowledges the importance of cultural knowledge in evaluating behavior that human clinicians can judge in context: “different cultures showcase different baselines of ‘normal’ behavior, and genders follow different social norms of ‘accepted behaviors.’” As Morency later said on a Spreaker podcast in 2015, “a lot more research is needed.”

Assuming that Ellie is a relevant aid for the population

by Joseph Frankel illustration by Lynnette Munoz of interviewees in which she’s been tested (participants seem to have been recruited through craigslist with little accounting for demographic diversity) what could that mean for everyone else? Recent studies argue both that symptoms of mental health disorders are expressed differently across cultures, and that clinician bias can affect diagnosis. When presented with patients of a different ethnic background than their own, human providers may be more likely to misread symptoms.

As a result Black men in the U.S. are more often misdiagnosed when it comes to depression, according to Jennifer Shepard Payne’s 2012 study in the Journal of the Society for Social Work and Research. Another study in the Journal of Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry (Adeponle et al, 2015) outlines the imprecise diagnosis of depression of refugee populations in Canada.

It’s heartening to think what good a tool like SimSensei could do if refined with data from populations of different ages, genders, ethnicities, and races. It might even have the potential to correct for human bias in diagnosing different groups of people. But it’s troubling to think of what might happen if measures developed from data limited to one population were taken as objective.

The problems in precisely mapping behavior to psychological state seem to present questions of accuracy, not ethics. But they’re very much tied to questions of ethics.

What if an employer could set up a camera that scanned the faces of potential interviewees? What about college admissions interviews? The military? The line between diagnosis and discrimination could be easily blurred. It’s not too hard to fly off the rails with the implications of a technology like this, if it’s given the authority Morency explicitly states it should not have.

But it’s important to keep in mind that the application of digital technology to mental health care is still in its infancy.

Especially as a layperson, it can be tempting to let speculation run wild. But if this system works, it could help a lot of people. There are many problems currently facing the mental health care system—shortages of mental health care providers throughout the U.S., limited affordability, and social barriers to access to care are just a few items on a long list. If a system like MultiSense is able to achieve its goals, it could allow many people in distress to get pointed towards the care they need.

Ideas about mental health care have changed a lot in the past century—mostly for the better. Hopefully that’s a trend that will continue, though it’s hard to say where technology will lead. But whatever happens, it’s hard to imagine humans will go completely out of style.

JOSEPH FRANKEL B’16 has bred moments of controversy in mental health care.

TECH

16

FUCK ME THROUGH THE CAMERA HOLE OF A TREPANNED MINION IPHONE CASE LIKE TWO LOVERS THROUGH A SHEET 17

LITERARY

by Liby Hays

LIKES Likes: Licking escalators, tongue transplants.

The Smallness and the Coarseness To love a small piece of rope.

The Restaurant It served microorganisms, among other things.

Death-Poem (Formerly, Death’s poem) ///……………………………//………………… …………………/……………Tushie

The College Hill Independent

3.19

3.22

3.25

St Patrick’s Day Parade Starts at Smith St and Hilltop Ave // all day // free Starts in Elmhurst at the corner of Smith St and Hilltop Ave and goes to the Statehouse. I don’t like parades very much, but maybe you do!

Poetic Resistance, a Night with Remi Kanazi and Omar Offendum Grant Recital Hall at Brown U, 105 Benevolent // 7.30pm // free An evening of slam poetry and hip hop featuring Palestinian-American poet Remi Kanazi and Syrian-American hip-hop artist Omar Offendum. They’ll rhyme and rap (in English) about Palestinian liberation, the Arab Spring, and the Arab immigrant experience in the US. Ch-ch-check it out!

Sock Puppet Making Workshop for All Ages AS220 // 6pm // $10–$12 Make a sock puppet and bring it to life under the guidance of AS220 Visiting Artist in Residence Marty Allen. Allen has been making sock puppets, and chronicling their individual life stories, for almost a decade.

New Urban Arts and Youth Pride, Inc. Yard Sale NUA, 705 Westminster St // 8am // free NUA is clearing out their basement for renovations. Come shop for art supplies, furniture, electronics, fabric, cameras, books, and more.

Lovesick EP Release Party with Way Out, Neutrinos, & Food Court AS220 // 9pm // $6 PVD post-punk band Lovesick is releasing a new self-titled EP and is being supported at this show by other alt-rock, surf-rock, and post-punk bands from PVD and Southeastern MA. Eve Essex, Kayla Guthrie, Bridget Feral, Tim Rovinelli Machines with Magnets // 10pm // ??

This show will feature local and NYC-based artists who work with noise and electronic experimentation. One time my friend subletted a really beautiful room from Bridget Feral.

Their music is probably equally as nice?

Hip Hop 4 Flint The Avenue Concept, 304 Lockwood St. // 2pm - 6pm // $10 tickets, $15 at the door This event is part of a series of hip hop shows happening all over the country on Saturday, with proceeds used to purchase water filters for folks in Flint, Michigan.

3.20 LoveCraft Weddings 3 Aurora // 11am–4pm // $10 The folks behind LoveCraft Weddings feel that traditional wedding shows, where vendors hawk their products and services, are too impersonal and sterile. LoveCraft Weddings is an alternative wedding show, featuring local, vintage, and handicraft vendors from Providence.

White Skin, Black Asks: Dialogue on White Supremacy Culture with White Noise Collective RI BioMed B13 at Brown University // 7pm // free The White Noise Collective is a very cool organization and they’re opening up a dialogue for everyone. Donations go toward D.A.R.E.’s Black Studies classes. Please go to this!! Make two of your friends come with you.

3.23 Finlandia Open House 116 Waterman St // 7pm // free Come have dinner and maybe consider eating or living in a cooperative community?

One of the guest List writers lived here for a year and will vouch for it being a very positive and loving community.

Gimmie Love Tour > Carly Rae Jepsen Fete Music Hall // 8pm // $25 Jepsen of “Call Me Maybe” fame is playing in Providence around the corner from this really good hot weiner place. Seriously, go get yourself two “all the way.”

Guest LW here: I think “I Really Like You” is a jam. And this will probably be a really surreal scene—would be wild to see a big popstar in such a small club.

3.24 A-Wa Somerville Armory, 191 Highland Ave, Somerville // 8pm // $23–$28 A-Wa are three Yemenite sisters in a cool electronic band. I’ve been told by a friend that they are one of the few Arabic-language musical acts to have mainstream appeal in their home country of Israel. Check out their song “Habib Galbi” for a taste.

LIKE HONESTLY: Brown/RISD Slam Team Send-Off Show Metcalf Auditorium // 7:30pm Brown and RISD’s slam poetry team is having their last show before they head to Nationals!

It’s kind of like Glee but not dumb. Honestly they’re just really cool and I want to go. Your guest LWs admit an inability to make any jokes here.

3.29 Labor History + Work/Death at Slater Mill Slater Mill, 67 Roosevelt Ave, Pawtucket // 7pm // $10 Slater Mill is the oldest textile mill in North America. This event brings together Slater Mill Interpreter and labor advocate Joey L DeFrancesco and musician Scott Reber (Work/Death) for a tour and site-specific performance inside the mill. I’ve been to previous iterations of this event and highly recommend it! Register in advance at brownpapertickets.com.

4.02 Blacks in Boston: Black… and Immigrant Boston College’s Gasson Hall // 9am– 5.30pm // free This conference considers what the experiences of Black immigrants to the US bring to the current conversation on US immigration policy. Contact aads@bc.edu for more information.

Rhode Island Fact of the Week Tourism is the lifeblood of the economy, well, along with agriculture and handicraft pottery.